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Polygamy

Martha S. Bradley

n some measure it was rumors of plural marriage that led to the assassination of the Prophet Joseph Smith and the eventual removal of the Saints from Nauvoo. Although it would not be until 1852 that apostle Orson Pratt would publicly announce before a general conference of the Church the doctrine of plural marriage, Joseph Smith was sealed to his first plural wife as early as 1835. In Nauvoo, Joseph introduced some of his most trusted associates to the doctrine, was himself sealed to several additional wives, and permitted others to do likewise.

As the Mormons traveled west, their plural families joined together as groups, sometimes for the first time. Brigham Young encouraged these family organizations, or "kingdoms," to unite into companies for the journey into the far West. After leaving Mt. Pisgah and arriving in Winter Quarters, Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs Young lived for the first time with her sister wives, women like Eliza R. Snow, who was sealed to Brigham Young after Joseph Smith's death.

Polygamy spread throughout the Great Basin with virtually all colonization efforts, although to say polygamy existed everywhere is a misleading conclusion. While it is likely that polygamists lived in most Mormon towns, plurality was much more popular in some places than in others. For example, the incidence of plural marriage was higher in southern settlements such as St. George and Santa Clara than in communities north of Salt Lake City such as Bountiful or Utah's gentile capital, Ogden, which had the lowest incidence of plural marriage.

It was a decade after the 1852 Pratt address that the federal government passed its first antibigamy law--the Morrill Act--prohibiting plural marriage in the territories. Because the country was in the midst of the Civil War, the law was left unenforced, and Mormons continued to practice plural marriage openly. During the 1870s, however, federal pressure to conform to the law increased and the 1879 Reynolds vs. United States case confirmed the constitutionality of the Morrill Act.

From that point forward, Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, and Chester A. Arthur publicly condemned the practice. In response to this and an overwhelming public outcry against the practice, Congress passed the Edmunds Act in 1882 and subsequently a strengthened version in 1887 known as the Edmunds-Tucker Bill. In addition to making polygamy a felony, these laws destroyed the temporal power of the Church by disincorporating it and calling for the escheat of Church properties. In response to these pressures, many polygamous members of the Church went into hiding in what became known among Mormons as the underground. Mormon society was completely disrupted as husbands, wives, and often children moved to surrounding states and territories like Afton, Wyoming, or Franklin, Idaho. Quickly it became apparent that the threat of arrest was just as real outside Utah, and Mormons looked elsewhere for refuge.